Writing Your Own Currency in Just a Few Lines of Code

Writing Your Own Currency in a Few Lines of Code

I’ve been following the development progress of Ethereum lately, which many have described as the “Cryptocurrency 2.0,” utilizing Bitcoin’s revolutionary decentralized consensus concepts while creating a whole new platform for building distributed applications. One of the most touted selling points of Ethereum is the ability for developers to create and manipulate Turing complete contracts on its blockchain. Ether, Ethereum’s internal currency, serves to power these contracts and the applications that arise from them. These contracts run in the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), but one will be able to use several higher level in-house languages (Serpent, LLL, and Mutan) to write the contracts that compile to EVM code. The Ethereum client exposes an API that can be accessed through Javascript, supplying various useful methods for interacting with Ethereum contracts. Hidskes’ blog post goes on to teach you how to write a backend Ethereum contract which will then interface with a simple HTML/Javascript frontend. This essentially serves as a functional albeit simple currency, with send/balance features but a 100% premine. You won’t be able to get anyone other than yourself or a friend to use it, but the proof of concept is there and that’s all we need to get started. It’s very straightforward, illustrative, and eye opening to the possibilities of decentralized app development with Ethereum. Check it out!